William Dalrymple: How Ancient India Transformed the World

Overview

The historian and co-host of the chart-topping podcast Empire, William Dalrymple, shares the rarely told story of India’s role as a cultural and scientific superpower of the ancient world.

One of Britain’s greatest living historians, William Dalrymple is known across the globe for his ability to bring the extraordinary history of the Indian subcontinent to life, whether through award-winning, bestselling books like Return of a King and The Anarchy, or his chart-topping podcast, Empire.

Now he tells the story of how, from 250BC to 1200AD, India transformed the world: exporting religion, art, science, medicine, and language along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific, creating a vast and profoundly important empire of ideas.

Like ancient Greece, ancient India came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why you are here and how you should live your life.

Out of India came holy men, monks and missionaries as well as pioneering merchants and artists, astronomers, healers, and scientists. Indian ideas crossed political borders and influenced everything they touched, from the statues in Roman seaports to the Buddhism of Japan, the poetry of China to the mathematics of Baghdad.